Dusa

The Dusa programming language and web editor
🔗 dusa.rocks

Dusa is a programming language with roots in answer set programming, designed with procedural content generation in mind. It looks like this:

Three rules in the Dusa language, partially describing a game of rock-paper-scissors

The language specification for Dusa was co-designed with my spouse, Chris Martens. I developed the language’s implementation and the website dusa.rocks while attending Recurse Center in 2023.

Language design

The documentation for Dusa includes a number of introductions to the language. The documentation project was my introduction to static site generation with Astro Starlight, which I found quite compelling and later used for reimplementing the Twelf.org website.

In December 2023, I attempted to use Dusa as much as possible to do the twenty-five code challenges of the 2023 Advent of Code, and took notes on the experience.

Frontend design

The interactive editor at dusa.rocks is an interactive application with no backend --- persistance is handled entirely through local storage. The site itself has a framework-less Typescript controller that manages the CodeMirror editor and three mostly-stateless React components. The controller also manages the web worker that handles CPU-intensive logic program execution.

The dusa.rocks editor, with overlay text indicating which parts of the page are made up of React islands

Component structure of dusa.rocks

The color scheme for Dusa was my first exploration of the OKLCH perceptual color space. My goal was to create an OKLCH-informed update of Ethan Shoonover’s influential Solarized color scheme.

The dusa.rocks editor in light mode and dark mode, showing the syntax highlighting scheme

Solarized-inspired, OKLCH-based color scheme for dusa.rocks